Nope, no white-supremacist, anti-black GOP voter suppression here, no sir.

Like Florida, Kentucky does not allow incarcerated citizens to vote, but does count them as residents for the purpose of drawing voting districts.  But it counts each inmate as one full person, rather than the 3/5 of a person traditionally allotted to such populations.

(yes, motherfuckers, I'm comparing mass incarceration and vote suppression to slavery.)

TPM:

A white Florida Republican suggested knocking a black, longtime Democratic congresswoman out of her seat by gerrymandering more prisoners into her district, according to audio obtained by Politico and published on Wednesday.

Politico reported that state Rep. Janet Adkins (R) made the suggestion regarding U.S. Rep. Corrinne Brown's (D) district in a closed-door meeting of the North Florida Republican caucus.

“It's a perfect storm," Adkins said on the audio recording. "You draw it in such a fashion so perhaps, a majority, or maybe not a majority, but a number of them will live in the prisons, thereby not being able to vote."

Adkins made sure there were no reporters in the room before she made her comments, according to the report.

Brown, who is black, has filed a lawsuit to challenge the proposed redrawing of her district. She also told the Florida Senate Redistricting Committee that she was concerned that redrawing her district to include more prisons would lower its black voting population from 50 to 45 percent, according to Politico.

When Politico approached Adkins, who is white, about the comments she made on the recording, she said she was having a "private conversation" and noted that she does not serve on the state House redistricting committee.

If you do not allow incarcerated people to vote, you are racists and election fraudsters. Period.

What Black Lives Matter Wants Would Improve Life for Everyone

And it's no surprise.  The history of America is the history of protesters and dissenters demanding "radical" changes that turn out to be exactly what the nation needed.

Welcome to that club, Black Lives Matter.

Kevin Drum:

A few weeks ago, after the disruption at Netroots Nation, I wondered aloud what the Black Lives Matter movement actually wanted. What were their demands? What did they want from candidates for president? I found a list of items on their website, but they were vague enough and broad enough to keep me a little puzzled. What sort of concrete initiatives were they interested in?

I'm happy to see that they've now come up with exactly what everyone's been asking for. It's called Campaign Zero, and it even comes with its own nifty graphic:

Some of these are easy: police body cams, for example, have become widely supported on both right and left, and by both activists and police. Others are a little harder: independent investigations of police shootings and better representation of minorities on police forces aren't universally supported, but they do have fairly wide backing already. And some are more difficult: it will be tough to wean police forces off their up-armored humvees and challenging to end the vogue for broken-windows policing.

That said, these are all specific and achievable goals. They even have a fact sheet here that tracks some of the presidential candidates and where they stand on each issue. Ironically, Bernie Sanders has positions that at least partly address eight of the ten items—more than anyone else. Martin O'Malley has seven and Hillary Clinton has two so far.

This is good stuff. BLM won't get everything it wants—nobody ever does—but Campaign Zero should allow them to avoid the fate of Occupy Wall Street, which generated a ton of passion but never really offered any place to channel it. BLM has now done both, and has a good shot at making their issues important ones during the upcoming presidential campaign.

How Locking People Up Destroys the Economy

Since mass incarceration has been a miserable failure for decades, let's try this: release every jail and prison inmate whose crime did not involve actual physical injury or death to another human being. If it's not murder, rape or aggravated assault, out they go.  Purge their records so they can get a job and a place to live. Assign them wrap-around services to reintegrate them into the community.

Then stand back and watch as the economy accelerates.

Nancy LeTourneau, at Political Animal, on how ruining the ability of millions of people to get jobs keeps the whole country impoverished. 

 

Just the way the plutocrats want it.

7. One recent study finds that our nation’s poverty rate would have dropped by 20 percent between 1980 and 2004 if not for mass incarceration and the subsequent criminal records that haunt people for years after they have paid their debt to society.

It is clear from this data that - if we are ever going to tackle the issue of (Labor Force Participation Rate) LFPR and the disparities in unemployment for people of color - it is critical that we address this issue. Also, as #7 suggests, doing so would have a dramatic affect on the current rate of poverty in this country.

Vallas and Dietrich provide pages of important actions that can be taken address this issue. But as Dietrich explains in another article, passage of the REDEEM Act - which would allow for the expungement of federal criminal records - is perhaps the most important step that could be taken immediately.

The next time a politician/candidate brings up the LFPR as a sign that our economy is still struggling (as Jeb Bush did just this week), I hope someone will ask them what their position is on the REDEEM Act.